"Where do you think it is."

"I expect that the people who made off with it sold the weapons and armor to the surrounding fortresses. We're at the worldwound; there's an obvious market for weapons and armor."

"Did you pay the missing guards to do that?"

"I did, Knight Commander. Now, seeing as we're both very busy people, I think you can skip ahead to your real questions."

"I will, in a moment. What happened to the missing soldiers."

"They wanted out. It's awful, Knight Commander, I know, but a lot of people do. I offered them the chance to help us out one last time, before they left."

"Okay, you win. What the hell are you trying to accomplish, Dorgelinda. In what sense does stealing a supply shipment help anyone except the people who stole it."

She sighs. She's not a young woman, but she usually doesn't come off as tired. She usually attacks her assigned tasks with an enviable amount of enthusiasm.

"Nerosyan doesn't send us paper, Knight Commander. Not more than a few stacks listed under luxury items, anyway."

"...I don't follow."

"The people who set our budgets and our supply lists are not soldiers, Knight Commander. They're royal councilors and petty bureaucrats, halfway to being the politicians whose boots they lick, the kind of people who flit around the queen like flies. They care about appearances, about cutting costs, about limiting anything that their bosses can point to and call a waste, or obvious corruption. They love sending us weapons, armor, and food. They'll send us a little money, which is meant to go to wages. They're smart enough to send us winter gear - but only for the people who they consider officially part of our forces, which doesn't include the Mongrels or the people from Wintersun, many of whom work twice as hard as the mercenaries for no pay at all. That leaves us with almost four hundred people who came to us half naked, and who would freeze if we didn't find a way to fill the gap. Groups that include children and elderly people, tagalongs that people don't want to imagine when they think of the brave crusader armies fighting the demons."

"Nerosyan doesn't send us enough paper or ink to keep the records we need. It doesn't send us boots or winter coats for anyone who isn't formally enlisted, and doesn't send us raw materials to make them out of. It doesn't send us nearly enough soap. It doesn't send us enough bowls to put food in. These are not things that people always want to think about, when they think about helping armies save the world, but armies need them just as much as they need swords. You can complain about this to Nerosyan, and waste what paper they do give you on shouting into a void that won't give you what you need anyway. Or you can try to solve the problem your damn self. So that's what I do, knight commander. I arranged to sell the masterwork weapons and armor in the shipment to buy supplies we needed more."

"What did you buy."

"A mix of things. Coats, boots, paper, and soap, like I said. Some food I thought would keep better than the things they sent us. Obviously the men who sold it wanted a cut, too. And there's some money left over, for if we desperately need anything different in two weeks. I'd hand you a list, but I was both breaking the law and facing a paper shortage, so I didn't keep one."

She sighs.

Dorgelinda's thoughts are pretty much in line with what she's saying. She expects Korva to be sympathetic to her and smart enough to see that unsavory tactics are sometimes necessary.

"Okay. I'm sympathetic. I appreciate your devotion to solving our problems."

"This still can't happen again. Ever. And by 'this', I mean any covert trading of supplies or resources that were meant to go to the soldiers or the crusade, not just faking bandit attacks. Any bribery, any embezzlement, any faking records to cover up buying something with Nerosyan's resources that you're not willing to commit to paper."

"Give me a list of the supplies you actually need. A version you need to maintain basic operations and keep people from immediately and preventably dying, and a version you need in order to do better than that and leave our forces as prepared as possible to fight demons. And in-between versions, or nice-to-haves, if you're willing to put them together. I will find the money under a rock somewhere. If I can't, we'll sell what supplies we have to openly, and keep records of it. If Nerosyan takes issue with us buying winter coats, I will tell them to fuck off in my very politest and most charismatic voice, and if necessary ask Queen Galfrey for aid directly. But this cannot happen again. If it does you will be removed."

"Do you understand me."

"I do, Knight Commander. I'm not sure it'll work."

"Well, if it doesn't, tell me openly, and we'll cross that bridge when we get there. I can't fix problems people hide."

"Yes, Knight Commander."

She goes to find Marit around lunchtime. She's trying not to look visibly mopey, but she's not entirely sure how much her headband helps her on that front.

Marit's been training the soldiers. It's going about as training soldiers always does. 

"Knight-Commander."

"Marit."

"I'm probably committed to finding a bunch of money under a rock now, if you have any more convenient rocks. Otherwise I guess my next steps are rock-hunting and getting some people together to construct a legal code we're willing to stick with."

"I do not know anyone else in Drezen to be a powerful wizard or otherwise extremely wealthy person who is in the service of your enemies," he confirms. His spies did identify one more person as a Baphomet cultist and another as selling stolen goods but that's not really urgent; it'll be in his next report. "I am unwilling to selectively spy on the really rich people so we can take their stuff but I am doing plenty of spying on them in the course of checking that they aren't compromised for strategic reasons."

"No, I think I actually meant more like the thing where you had like six ideas about how to do recruitment that had not occurred to me when we first spoke, and I was sort of wondering whether you had any similar ideas about how to get people to donate to your noble and righteous cause, or maybe how to make having a noble and righteous cause pay for itself. Other than looting demon artifacts, which I have figured out."

"My old commander spent half the off-seasons fundraising in Oppara. You go in with the stories and the songs and the demon artifacts to show off, you set up a magnificent mansion and invite all the important people for dinners, you regret the impossibility of finding an invitation for all the slightly less important people unless, you know, they were contributors to the Crusade, in which case they'd definitely be in. You drop promising hints about all of the valuable land you're reclaiming that's surely going to get assigned to somebody. A lot of this you do not want to do until you know your way around politics well enough to not step in hornet's nests. 

There's also, if you have loyal high-circle spellcasters, assigning them to spend the off-season making money. You know, the ordinary way, a Teleport route or scries for pay or regrowing peoples' fingers - if Seelah can't do that yet, she should be able to soon. A lot of wizards won't go for that, they're on the Crusade in the first place because they don't want to live a life like that and if they're going to they'd rather keep the money, but - some people will do it, if they're in this because they really want to see it succeed. I wouldn't really recommend it this year because you don't have enough high-circle people but...you will, if you keep fighting and winning.

And then there's the Church of Abadar. You show up and ask them about financing options and they do a lot of math and offer you terms that won't sound very good but - sometimes a crusade is all about momentum, and it's easier to pay twice as much next year than to go without right now. Especially as - I get the sense you are growing in power rapidly, and that's precisely when it might be worth paying twice as much next year, if you think you'll be twice as able to pay then."

"Well, I am certainly growing in power astonishingly rapidly, but not yet having experienced a year of this I have no idea how to predict how anything will be going in another year."

"Pretty unsure to what extent I have loyal anybody. I guess Daeran would probably do it, but I" am not sure I am actually willing to let him out of my sight for that long "really do need him for pretty much all adventuring where someone might die, and a spontaneous Breath of Life will save us a diamond. ...Ember is probably capable of it and would probably be willing to."

"Woljif left last night. He didn't desert, I told him he was allowed to go and he left. So that's how the rest of my day is going."

"Ah. I'm sorry. It would be - nice if trying to do right by people always resulted in things going well.

Do you want to go out skydiving?"

"What, uh, does skydiving consist of, in terms of the actual steps? You just use a fly, and then let it cut out and feather fall before you splat?"